Adobe recently made available the public beta version for Flash Player 10, code-named Astro. Astro, which has no set final release date, has several new features Adobe hopes will help maintain the plug-in's dominance among an ever-expanding group of competitive rich Internet application platforms and development methodologies, including Microsoft Silverlight, Ajax, and Sun's forthcoming JavaFX.

Among the new features in this edition of Flash Player are support for new 3D rendering effects, Adobe Pixel Blender filters, new drawing APIs, and an advanced text rendering engine. Flash Player 10 has also expanded use of graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware acceleration.

“For over ten years Adobe has pushed the limits of creativity and redefined rich interactive Web experiences with Adobe Flash Player. Adobe has a long track record of creating technologies that influence market direction and we believe this beta release of Adobe Flash Player 10 raises the bar once again,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe.

The new version can be downloaded from the Adobe Labs site and is available for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 2000, Mac OS X and Linux. The beta software-testing version was released in particular for web developers to use it on their applications and provide a complete feedback. It is the first version of Flash that offers developers the option to use custom filters and effects.

Offering a public beta version, company official expect users to encounter a series of bugs and errors. This is why they invited all users to submit their feedback to Adobe’s developers or express their opinion and present their issues on the public forums.

The pre-release version Astro is available immediately for free download at Adobe Labs Downloads.